As contemporary society progresses, people spend less time preparing and consuming meals. Fast food provides one option for those who want their meal in a short time ready for consumption; however, many people no longer desire fast food or can not eat it, due to its lack of nutrition and in particular, its high calorie, salt, and fat content.
Prepared foods, such as those appearing in supermarkets, take-out establishments, and the like, while appearing to be home cooked, are typically expensive. Additionally, like fast food, these prepared foods lack nutritional value, and are usually high in calories, salt, and fat. Accordingly, both fast food and prepared foods do not appeal to health conscious consumers.
Health conscious consumers have found some suitability in frozen meals and prepackaged meals, such as those that can be heated in a microwave oven; however, these frozen meals typically mix together all of their contents. Accordingly, when cooked or reheated, some of the contents may be undercooked, while some of the contents may be overcooked. Similarly, room temperature prepackaged meals may suffer partial degradation and discoloration of the components while in storage, and when heated in a microwave oven, the components may also cook unevenly.
To address some of the problems of intermixed frozen meals, a food container for use in a microwave with an internal separator dividing the container into upper and lower compartments was developed. The upper compartment is configured for a food product and the lower for a water or water-containing medium. The separator is a thin perforated sheet that is designed to snap into place with evenly spaced internal lugs. When the food container is placed in the microwave and heated the steam created by the water medium passes through the separator to steam the product. The problem with this food container is that the separator is configured to latch into place for use with the container, thereby inhibiting the availability of the water-containing medium after the food product is steamed.
Therefore a need still exists for an ovenable cooking apparatus that facilitates improved cooking of a food product in microwave ovens, conventional ovens, combination ovens and all other typical cooking apparatuses which separates the food product from the sauce or liquid and allows the consumer to easily access the food product and sauce after cooking.
There exists a similar need for improvements in the food service industry. The food service industry currently prepares food in commercial settings using foodservice tray pans that include a mixture of food ingredients. Typically, the food comprises a frozen mass of ingredients such as starch, protein, vegetables, and sauce. To prepare and serve the food, the frozen foodservice tray is heated in an oven, commercial oven, convection oven, combination oven, microwave oven, steam cooker, or the like. Because the food ingredients are frozen in a large mass, the heating times can be from one to two hours or more. The quality of the food using this method may sometimes be undesirable, resulting in overcooked or undercooked ingredients, variation in food texture, or discoloration of the food ingredients. Further, consumers cannot plate their meals according to their individual tastes because all the ingredients are mixed together. The current method is also incompatible with breaded ingredients because they come out soggy and do not meet consumer approval.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a method and apparatus for preparing food in the commercial food sector that is more efficient and produces higher quality food products.